sunman42

If he wants "control," he's welcome to build his own digital ecosystem, and his impose his own rules. We'll thene able to see if anyone wants to play by them.

I'm dubious about the "need" for his product in any case. The hey.com homepage blurb claims:

"It feels great to get an email from someone you care about. Or a newsletter you enjoy. Or an update from a service you like. That’s how email used to feel all the time.

"But things changed.

"You started getting stuff you didn’t want from people you didn’t know. You lost control over who could reach you. An avalanche of automated emails cluttered everything up.

"And Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and Apple just let it happen."

Well, I've been using Mail.app for well over a decade, and have never received spam on my mac.com account. Other accounts, yes (though not many, thanks to SpamSieve), but that's the ISP's job not the mail client's. (I know this service is going to "disrupt" that model.)

Flash: I never got excited about receiving an email message, particularly after management at my former employer caught on to the idea in the 1990s, and decided to spam me from the corporate server. And boy, was it ever spam, the directorate secretary's "Who stole my scissors?" missive to all ~ two thousand employees and contractors in the unit included.

But more to the point (if say, I were a potential VC): who under the age of 40 uses email (other than communicating with Mom and Dad?

lkrupp said:

Bottom line? Don't expect iPhone/iPad/iMac/MacBook manufacturing to come to the U.S. any time soon. It will always be a pipe dream.

As Steve Jobs explained to President Obama in 2011, it's not the labor coasts that drive where Apple manufactures its products, but the ready supply of manufacturing process engineers and access to international supply chains. I believe I recall Mr. Jobs's saying that the difference in labor costs per iPhone would be in the single digits of dollars if they were assembled in the US. We just don't have the supply of (associate's degree-level) process engineers. Makes sense, as it's only in the final assembly that any human is involved in the process.

Frankly, this story suggests to me that (1) our robotics engineers aren't that clever and (2) industrial robotics has been focused on large system assembly (say, cars), rather than fine object assembly. New technologies will have to be researched and implemented to make the latter possible; the only question is whether it makes sense financially.

Remember that since 2008, Mac Pros have been assembled in the US, in a largely automated plant — though fine assembly is still done by humans. I suspect the labor involved in that manufacturing process is also a negligible cost factor.... especially considering the denominator. 

"Battleship" ≠ destroyer.

Who? Never heard of the guy.

"Unwarranted." I see what you did there.